De Chirico’s Archaeologists and the Ruins of Rome
Giorgio de Chirico, an Italian artist of the twentieth century, saw the world in terms of
archetypes of classical mythology and used the iconography of these archetypes in his
work. The myths of antiquity were the means by which de Chirico mediated the world
around him. I argue that in the series of works known as the Archaeologists, de Chirico
engages conceptually with the legacy of classical antiquity not as metaphor, but as a
means of negotiating an understanding of the material nature of the relationship between
the past and present.
It was during his first visit to Rome in 1924 that de Chirico developed the forms of the
Archaeologist series, which would continue to appear and reappear in both painting and
sculpture throughout his career. The Archaeologist figures are composite
anthropomorphic forms. They have a mannequinesque physique, but at the same time are
sculptural and even architectural. Their rotund torsos are composed of architectural and
landscape fragments of ancient Rome. Visible are fragments of marble sculpture,
columns, and veneers of ancient Roman buildings. The brickwork of the superstructure of
these buildings is exposed as its marble facing has deteriorated. Beneath the brick
foundations of the architectural members are discernable landscape elements of Rome
itself, including the earth of the hills of Rome and the waters of the Tiber. De Chirico’s
appropriation of antique iconography into the new context of a dream-like space imbues
theses images with a quality of timelessness, and yet, simultaneously calls attention to
their temporality.
Notions of fragmentation and decay, both literal and metaphorical, are themes present in
the Archaeologist series. For de Chirico, the fragment was not only an index of the past,
but that of the present as well. The fragmentary figures and landscapes of the
Archaeologist series recall the imagery of a scene provided by Pliny the Elder in Natural
History (36.101). Pliny describes an imaginary vision of the city of Rome, eight hundred
years in the future. Pliny imagines a scene from the future of the ruins of the buildings of
Rome gathered together and placed in one great heap (universitate vero accervata et in
quondam unum coiecta). Pliny’s vision of an accumulation of debris in the future Rome
provides a meditation on the nature of the relationship between time and the material
world. De Chirico’s Archaeologist series provides a visual explication of processes
fragmentation and decay, but also, accumulation and creation. Just as in Pliny’s
visualization of the future of the material remains of the city of Rome, the Archaeologist
figures are physical forms created by the accumulation of crumbling fragments and debris
of the material monuments of the past. For de Chirico, the past and the present were not
so far away from each other, but it is in the Archaeologist series, however, that de Chirico
dissolves utterly the boundary between past and present. With the Archaeologists, de
Chirico not only represents the iconography of classical antiquity, but he reassembles it
as a means of constructing a new conceptualization of time, materiality, and mythology.